Witness History
Episodes
White Christmas
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
American entertainer Bing Crosby made 'White Christmas' by Irving Berlin, one of the defining songs of World War Two. Rebecca Kesby has been speaking ...
The return of the beaver
11 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2009, beavers were released into the wild in the Knapdale forest on the west coast of Scotland, some 400 years after they were wiped out in the UK...
Neanderthal cave mystery
10 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A teenage potholer discovered a cave system near the town of Bruniquel in France in 1990 which contained a mysterious circular structure. It turned ou...
Chief Albert Luthuli wins the Nobel Prize for Peace
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Chief Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize he was living under a banning order in rural South Africa. He won the prize for advocating peacefu...
The pioneer of 'Mountain Filming'
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1920 a German filmmaker called Arnold Fanck shot his first film - 'Marvels of the Snowshoe' - high in the mountains. He and his team dragged camera...
The life and work of Chester Himes
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The African-American crime writer Chester Himes first found widespread success in France. Although his early works had been published in the USA it wa...
The V1 flying bomb
04 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1944, Nazi Germany launched the V1s against the UK. The V1 was a pilotless, jet-propelled flying bomb - the first of its kind in the world and a pr...
The slaves who defeated Napoleon
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The first successful slave uprising in modern times happened in present-day Haiti. Former slave, Toussaint Louverture, forced the French colony to abo...
France's Muslim headscarf ban
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A controversial law banning Islamic headscarves and other religious symbols from French state schools came into effect in 2004. The ban was designed t...
Iraq's pioneering feminist
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Naziha Al-Dulaimi became the first woman to hold a ministerial office in the Arab world when she was appointed to head Iraq's Municipalities Minist...
How Ethiopian rebels took power in 1991
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In May 1991, the brutal Ethiopian dictator, Colonel Mengistu and his miltary regime were on the verge of collapse after years of civil war. The end ca...
The fight for disabled rights in the UK
27 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The UK government passed the landmark Disability Discrimination Act in November 1995. The legislation made it illegal for employers or service provid...
Rwanda at the Paralympics
26 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012, the Rwandan sitting volleyball team became the first Paralympians from their country. The sport began in Rwanda after thousands of people wer...
India's campaign for disability rights
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1995, the first disability rights legislation was passed by India's parliament. An estimated 60 million people, almost six percent of Indi...
Britain's little blue disability car
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For decades disabled people in the UK were offered tiny, three-wheeled, turquoise cars as their main form of transport. They were known as Invacars an...
Helen Keller
23 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Helen Keller was born in Alabama in the USA in 1880. A childhood illness left her deaf and blind, but she still learned to speak and read and write. ...
When the Egyptian president went to Israel
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977, Anwar Sadat became the first Egyptian president to visit Israel and address the Israeli parliament the Knesset. At the time, Egypt was still ...
Our Bodies, Ourselves
19 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Some have described Our Bodies, Ourselves as “obscene trash” – for others it’s a vital source of information about women’s health and sexual...
America's WW2 refugee camp
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1944 President Franklin D Roosevelt agreed to allow nearly one thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe to come to America. The...
The world's first woman premier
17 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected the modern world's first female head of government in 1960 when she became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka or Ceylon as ...
Captured by Somali pirates
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2008, Captain Colin Darch and his crew were taking a tug boat from Russia to Singapore when they were attacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Ade...
The 'good enough' mother
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott helped shape childcare in Britain through a series of BBC radio broadcasts in the 1940s and 50s. He s...
When Pluto lost its planet status
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An international committee of astronomers agreed Pluto wasn't really a planet in 2006. They reclassified it as a 'dwarf planet' instead. The decision ...
World War One in Africa
11 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of World War One, British and German colonial forces went into battle in East Africa. Tens of thousands of African troops and up to a mil...
Makaton - the signing system that changes lives
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s, British speech therapist Margaret Walker invented a revolutionary system of communication for children and adults with special needs. Ma...
The Guerrilla Girls
09 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1985, a group of anonymous female artists in New York began dressing up with gorilla masks on their heads and putting up fly-posters around the cit...
The church that rose from the rubble
06 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005 Dresden’s Lutheran church, the Frauenkirche, opened its doors to the public for the first time in 60 years. The Frauenkirche in the East Ger...
The 1945 Pan-African Congress
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The 5th Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in 1945 to shape the post-war struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination. Prominent bl...
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On November 4th 1995 the Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen sang at a peace rally in Tel Aviv alongside Israel's leader Yitzhak Rabin. Moments later the Pr...
'I just wanted to be white'
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, thousands of children were born to white German women and black American soldiers who were stationed in A...
The sex musical that wowed New York and London
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1969, a theatrical revue called Oh Calcutta opened in New York featuring extensive male and female nudity. Created by renowned critic Kenneth Tynan...
With the president on 9/11
30 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On September 11 2001, President George W. Bush was visiting an elementary school in Florida as two planes hit the World Trade Center. In an image that...
Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In June 1979 the Moral Majority was launched and changed the course of American politics. It was set up to promote family values by religious conserva...
The Watergate scandal
28 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1973, the US Senate began an investigation which would eventually lead to Richard Nixon standing down as President a year later. Senator Howard Bak...
Shirley Chisholm - the black woman who tried to be president
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In January 1972 Shirley Chisholm became the first major-party black candidate to make a bid for the US Presidency. She was also the first black woman ...
When JFK won the US presidency
26 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ted Sorensen was a close aide and speechwriter for John F Kennedy. In an interview with Lucy Williamson he remembered the night that Kennedy won the U...
Nasa's pioneering black women
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Usually it is the names of astronauts that people remember about the space race. But less celebrated are the teams of people working on how to put a r...
The missing victims of apartheid
22 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, South Africa set up the Missing Persons Task Team to trace and locate the remains of the hundreds, possibly thousands, who disappeared in "po...
The Cutter Incident
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1955, more than 100,000 children in America were inoculated with a defective batch of the brand-new polio vaccine. Because of a manufacturing...
Joan Littlewood, 'mother of modern British theatre'
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The working class woman who shook up the British theatre establishment in the 1950s and 60s. Joan Littlewood introduced improvisation and helped break...
Why Portugal decriminalised all drugs
19 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the grip of a drugs crisis, the country took a radical approach in 2001 and became the first country in the world to decriminalise all drugs for pe...
Saddam Hussein's big movie project
16 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1980 the Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, tried to launch his country's entry into the world of movie making. He spent millions of dollars on an ep...
The US Voting Rights Act of 1965
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Although African Americans were guaranteed the right to vote by the constitution, many in the south were being denied that right. During the civil rig...
The last of the Kazakh herders
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many of the nomadic herders in Kazakhstan left the USSR and moved to China in the 1920s. They feared being forced into collective farms by the Soviet ...
The end of the Lebanese Civil War
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On October 13th 1990, the Syrian airforce pushed their most outspoken opponent in Lebanon, General Michel Aoun, to take refuge in the French embassy i...
The launch of CNN
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In June 1980, US media mogul Ted Turner launched the first TV station dedicated to 24 hour news, Cable News Network or CNN. Some were sceptical that ...
The Battle of Lewisham
09 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1977, the racist National Front organisation planned to stage a march into Lewisham in South London at a time of high racial tension in the ...
Desmond's - a sitcom that changed Britain
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Desmond's was the most successful black sitcom in British TV history. It ran on Channel 4 for over five years, attracting millions of viewers. Trix Wo...
Fighting racism on the dancefloor
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
New laws were used to stop nightclubs and discos from banning black and ethnic minority customers in 1978. The first club to be taken to court was a d...
Britain's first black woman headteacher
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Yvonne Conolly was made headteacher of Ringcross Primary school in North London in 1969. She had moved to the UK from Jamaica just a few years earlier...
The voyage of the Empire Windrush
05 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of pioneering migrants travelled from the Caribbean to the UK on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. The passage cost £28,10 shillings. Pa...
The house by the lake
02 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A summer house built by a lake outside Berlin in the 1920s reflects much of Germany's 20th century history. Its first owners fled the Nazis. The Berli...
Operation Breakthrough: Fighting to save three whales
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Three Californian gray whales got caught in ice off Alaska in October 1988. Indigenous people, environmentalists, oil companies and even the Soviet Na...
The founding of Google
30 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world's most popular search engine was launched in September 1998 by two PHD students from Stanford University in California. Larry Page and Serge...
The Mafia trial of Italy’s former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli explains how leading Italian politician Giulio Andreotti was put on trial in Sicily in September 1995, accused of collus...
The death of Gamal Abdel Nasser
28 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The charismatic Egyptian president dominated Arab politics for almost two decades up until his death on September 28th 1970. His funeral was attended ...
Bush v Gore: The 'hanging chads' US election of 2000
25 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The US presidential election of 2000 was one of the closest and most contested in history. It was more than a month before the result was decided aft...
Blackwater killed my son
24 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 16 September 2007 private security guards employed by the American firm Blackwater opened fire on civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Seventeen I...
When Nelson Mandela went to Detroit
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just months after his release from prison in 1990 the South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela toured the USA. One of the eight cities he went to ...
How Liberia wrote off its debts
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How the Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was negotiated to write off billions of dollars of debt, accumulated over two decades of civil war. C...
The Galileo project
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Galileo mission to examine the planet Jupiter had its beginnings in the 1970s. It finally came to an end on 21st September 2003. Professor Fred Ta...
The mothers of Argentina's disappeared
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1977 a group of women in Argentina held the first ever public demonstration to demand the release of thousands of opponents of the military r...
Tank Man
17 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A photo of a man confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in Beijing caught the world's imagination. Carrying two plastic shopping bags, unarmed and alo...
The Mau Mau struggle against British rule
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the 1950s in Kenya, armed rebels known as the Mau Mau fought against British rule. Thousands were taken captive and interned in camps by the Br...
Resisting 'Europe's last dictator' in Belarus
14 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 20 years, people in Belarus have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko - who's been dubbed Eu...
Why the US rejected universal healthcare
11 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The USA is the only rich democracy not to provide universal healthcare. After WW2 US President Harry Truman was horrified that only a fifth of all Ame...
Banning alcohol in an Indian state
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Punyavathi Sunkara recalls how she campaigned to stop the sale of alcohol in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to protect women from domestic violenc...
The birth of Reddit
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Huffman had been programming software since he was eight-years-old. At the University of Virginia, he met his future business partner, Alexis Oh...
The Dawson's Field hijacking
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Barbara Mensch recalls how she was hijacked and held in Jordan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September 1970. Barbara’s pla...
Haiti's cholera outbreak
08 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In October 2010, Haiti was hit by an outbreak of cholera, the first in recent history of the impoverished Caribbean nation. Nepalese peacekeepers belo...
Care in the Community
04 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1990s Britain closed down many of its long-stay hospitals and asylums and their patients were sent to new lives in the community. But the trans...
The Cape Town bombings
03 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Between the late 1990s and 2002 there were more than 150 bomb attacks in the South African city of Cape Town. The authorities blamed them on a group k...
The birth of the Sony Walkman
02 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The portable cassette player that brought music-on-the-move to millions of people was launched in 1979. By the time production of the Walkman came to ...
Flying through a volcano
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When a British Airways flight carrying 248 passengers took off one evening in 1982 heading from Kuala Lampur to Australia, everything seemed fine. Bu...
Inventing James Bond
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The author Ian Fleming created the fictional super-spy, James Bond, in the 1950s. Fleming, a former journalist and stockbroker, had served in British ...
Who has the right to vote in America?
28 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era electoral law was designed to protect African-American and other minority voters. It was in...
St Kilda
27 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1930 the last inhabitants left their homes on the remote Scottish islands of St Kilda. It was the end of a traditional Gaelic-speaking commu...
Occupy Wall Street
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, the Occupy movement staged demonstrations against financial inequality across the world. The biggest was in New York, where a retired police ...
America's first woman combat pilot
25 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1993, Jeannie Leavitt became the first woman to fly a US Air Force fighter plane after the Pentagon lifted its ban on female pilots engaging in com...
Margaret Ekpo - Nigeria's feminist pioneer
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the leading figures in Nigeria's fight for democracy was Margaret Ekpo, a feminist politician and trades union leader. After Nigerian independe...
The siege at Ruby Ridge
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Randy Weaver was a white separatist in Idaho in the north-west United States who was wanted by the government on firearms charges. When government age...
The American who put women's rights in the Japanese constitution
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In November 1946, Emperor Hirohito proclaimed a new post-war constitution for Japan which contained clauses establishing women's rights for the first ...
The Guatemalan syphilis scandal
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A team of American doctors, led by the distinguished physician Dr John Cutler, carried out secretive STD tests in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The doc...
The first modern asthma inhaler
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Asthma affects more children than any other non-communicable disease - and it was a teenager who first asked her father "why can't they put my asthma ...
The lost King of England
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester discovered the lost grave of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. Richard was the King ...
Surviving Saddam
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Zainab Salbi grew up in the inner social circle of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s because her father worked as Saddam’s personal p...
The invention of the modern ventilator
14 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1952, the Blegdam Hospital in the Danish capital Copenhagen was overwhelmed by hundreds of seriously ill polio patients. During the first we...
Scoring a victory for women's rights in Turkey
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2004 feminist campaigners in Turkey forced a radical change in the law on crimes against women. The overhaul of the country's 80-year-old penal cod...
Beirut's Hotel War
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, Beirut’s luxury hotel district was turned into a battlefield, with rival groups of gunmen holed up i...
Bremen’s Elephant Statue
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amid the ongoing debate about how to handle historical monuments which commemorate colonialism and slavery, Witness History hears the story of a giant...
Radar and World War Two
10 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During World War Two, British women were employed as operators of a top-secret radar system for detecting aircraft. The new technology had helped shif...
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The USA dropped its first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. Three days later a second atomic bomb was detonated over N...
The battle of Midway
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 4th June 1942, aircraft carriers of the Japanese and American fleets fought a huge naval battle near Midway Atoll in the Pacific. The outcome marke...
The internment of Japanese Americans
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to prison camps after the USA entered World War Two following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Whole families f...
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
03 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise strike on the American naval base, Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. Thousands of American servicemen were killed...
The death of Heinrich Himmler
31 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of Hitler's most important henchmen was caught by British troops in the chaos of post-war Germany just after WW2 had ended in Europe. A British so...
Benidorm and the birth of package tourism
30 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish town of Benidorm is now one of the world's most popular holiday resorts - receiving more than 10 million visitors a year. The hotels and s...
Adrift for 76 days
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A remarkable story of survival. In 1982, Steven Callahan was sailing alone across the Atlantic when one night his yacht hit something in the water and...
Australia's 'Black Saturday' bushfires
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The forest fires of 2019-2020 in Australia were the worst the country had ever experienced - but ten years earlier Australia had a foretaste of that d...
The writer who put Latinos centre stage
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Cuban-American Dolores Prida wrote with a distinctive voice in her plays, newspaper columns and as an agony aunt in the Latina magazine. She chall...